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Comment by slantyyz | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it's a combination of overreliance on algorithmic rankings + seo or what, but if I search for something like "Panasonic GH5" (something I searched recently), I want to see the top two ranked items as the Panasonic product page, followed by the Wikipedia page.

When I run that search on Google in Canada, there is a Panasonic link on the first page (third link), but it's for the US store listing, which has less info on it than the normal product page.

But as you say, search is in a horrendous state. So is video discovery on Youtube. It seems like my front page recommendations on Youtube have turned to garbage in the last 12 months.

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Maybe the idea is to encourage Panasonic to pay Google to get their result on the first page.

Maybe ten or fifteen years in the future, paying to Google (or Facebook, or...) will be the only way to have your web page delivered to anyone.

I mean, why should Google display your page to anyone for free, if someone else is willing to pay to have their page displayed instead. It's not like people are going to switch en masse to something else, just because Google results become slightly less relevant. And when paying becomes the new normal (e.g. it will become normal to pay to have Hacker News on the first page for "Hacker News"), the results will return to be more relevant again.

For certain niches, this is already happening. Pretty much every web hosting company nowadays run ad campaigns for their own brand, because other companies kept advertising on those keywords, and the only way to put their own web site up top is to outbid the competitor.

I agree that Google search is horrendous but Youtube is actually manageable. If you want decent recommendations you need to curate your viewing history. If you watch some random video and find a lot of annoying related videos showing up in your recommendations then go into your history and delete that one video from the history. Now Youtube will "forget" you watched that video and stop recommending things related to it.

I use Youtube in a very specific way: I subscribe to a bunch of channels that I like and only watch what those people post. My recommendations tend to be very focused around things related to my interests. Occasionally I will look up a random video for whatever reason and I'm always careful to delete it from my history unless I actually want more recommendations related to it.

I agree and will go further. I love YouTube, the content and the concept. I watch more YouTube than any other streaming service (except for Space-Force on NetFlix - damn it's good !). Sure not every video that is recommended will be what you like.. but it's quite a hard problem I think to recommend something in EVERY GRID POSITION that you will like.. Usually I'm willing to watch at least 2/5 to 4/5 videos being recommended AND I have "discovery" most of my fav channels I still follow to this day via their algorithms. But maybe it's just me :)

About a year ago, my Youtube front page feed was pretty good. Then it has slowly degraded since then. I went from Youtube being the service I used the most to watch stuff to becoming much less interested. Most of my recommendations don't even come from my subscriptions.

I like my recommendations not coming from my subscriptions. I check my subscriptions for new stuff often, so I want the recommendations to be other stuff.

But you're right, they outright sucks. They are definitely dynamic because I only have to show my son a single Roblox video to change it, but at the same times there are stuff that is repeatedly showing up that I have no interest in. Even stuff that I've told YouTube that I'm in no way interested in...

What I REALLY miss is a random category - for stuff that I would never otherwise see.

Youtube 12 months ago was less bad without me having to do anything.

Youtube can make me do work to improve my experience, but I do have another option, stop using Youtube's front page and just discover stuff via Reddit or search engine results.

I had a similar experience with Google News trickling up garbage news sources, and I spent way too much time blacklisting sources, and have basically given up on it.

They are relying too much on AI and "collective wisdom". The results you get now are what Google thinks you want based on what others want, not on what you are actually searching for. What you typed is now treated as a mere clue, not as a search key.

Depends maybe Panasonics enterprise SEO game is weak - you should rank your product pages on page one

From the perspective of a search engine's end user, Google should find those product pages and set them at the top of the results whether Panasonic's SEO is good or not, otherwise I'm going to switch to a search engine that can figure that stuff out.

The onus is on the search engine to produce good results, because they're the one providing the service. Hell, that's why I started using Google around 2000, they had the best first page search results.

You have no idea how bad some corporate web presences are

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